Word: phoney
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...really Fosse's supple use of editing that holds the film together though. Its best moment, in my mind, occurs as Minnelli and York kiss and begin to make love while the camera threatens to fade into the phoney discreteness of a rain-soaked window. Suddenly, the rain becomes the smokey white light of the cabaret and Miss Minnelli's head returns to view as she begins to sing "Maybe This Time," a lovely Judy Garland type song that meshes perfectly with the previous scene. In achieving a balanced counterpoint between movie "reality" and movie "artifice," Cabaret saves itself from...
...Phoney tunes," as they are called, seem to have originated in the Detroit area about five months ago when Kenneth Ascher, 20, a pre-med student at Eastern Michigan University, called WXYZ Disc Jockey Dick Purtan and said: "Listen to this." Since then, Purtan says, "people have been going crazy, calling up to play Old Folks at Home, Happy Birthday and everything else." One Detroit lawyer is being driven to distraction, Purtan says, because his phone number corresponds to the hallowed "shave and a haircut, two bits" refrain...
Student Ascher, meanwhile, seems to be solidifying his position as the nation's No. 1 phoney tunesmith; he is currently working on a pushbutton adaptation of Rubber Duckie. Phone musicians have learned not to begin pushing out a tune as soon as they lift the receiver. If the first number they punch is 0, for example, they will automatically get the operator. Even worse, the tune they select might well complete an expensive call to London or Paris. Experienced players usually place a local call to a friend and tap out new melodies to him only after the connection...
...film have given way to the empty frames of the latter. Details--like the overhead roar of a jet--are conspicuous by the absence of a fully developed mise-en-scene. Continuity is confusing (the New England snows are there one scene, gone the next); interiors look pop-art phoney (in particular, the South Station gambit). And when the crooked cop reads a short note that Peter has sent him, the words are on screen so long you've time to memorize its contents. For a young film director, Williams has surprisingly little sense of daring. The whole final third...
...verse translation of Moliere's play. It's a very difficult task to make an American audience sit through a play in which the characters speak in verse: we'll make the necessary effort for Shakespeare, but we're not used to it, and it sounds--well, phoney. Especially when it rhymes. Wilbur's translation, however is so wonderfully apt and witty that it's a pleasure to hear it spoken. There are few trite or forced rhymes. And it's a novel and delightful experience to find oneself laughing at a particularly unexpected yet apt rhyme. With apologies...